Interview with 2025 PIE Poster Artist & Special Guest: Angela Oddling!
PIE is thrilled to announce Angela Oddling as our very first official poster artist and special guest! Angela is a visual artist based in the woody hills of Western Pennsylvania. She gravitates toward illustration work where she can create designs for comics, graphic novels, games, and other publications. She also facilitates workshops focusing on creative processes such as storytelling through comics and zines, working through creative block and imposter syndrome.
Angela’s personal work weaves monsters and magic into the tales of everyday characters. She creates art that explores the not-so-fun and complicated parts of being a person and how they affect our journeys to self-love and acceptance. She aims to create a place of belonging and comfort within her work and hopes to make her readers feel a little less alone.
Organizer Harry Amplas sat down with Angela at Bantha Tea Bar (this is relevant, we promise!) to learn more about her creative process.
Harry: I'm here with Angela Oddling. She's an extremely talented writer and illustrator who's been publishing her own comic, Detached, online since 2018 and physically since 2023. She also illustrated The Bad Parts by MA Lanick and Super Cats by Caleb Thusat (a fellow PIE 2025 exhibitor!) Angela, can you tell us about the experience of turning your webcomic, Detached, into a physical book?
Angela: So I started working on it around 2016 or 2017. When I started, it was just photocopy paper with Sharpies! That was the original comic that I was uploading to this comic platform, Tapas, where it got I think up to 10,000 subscribers. It's no longer there because I was trying to kind of take back, you know, my web presence and putting everything out there in a bunch of different places. But I had it on there for a handful of years and, like any artist, my style developed over time and changed a lot. So I would go back, change things, rewrite it, add a little bit, republish it online, and kind of just like…keep doing that. But I was sort of stuck in a loop. So at some point in 2022, I made the decision to be like, you know what? I'm just going to make it into a book because I can't take that back. That's just out there in tangible physical corporeal realm.
Angela: But I had it on there for a handful of years and, like any artist, my style developed over time and changed a lot. So I would go back, change things, rewrite it, add a little bit, republish it online, and kind of just like…keep doing that. But I was sort of stuck in a loop.
So at some point in 2022, I made the decision to be like, you know what? I'm just going to make it into a book because I can't take that back. That's just out there in tangible physical corporeal realm.
So I ended up doing a Kickstarter campaign in 2023 and the funding was successful so I printed the first two books. And then last year, in 2024, I ended up printing books 3-4 through another successful Kickstarter campaign.
So they're out in the world and now I can only move forward. No moving back anymore.
Harry: What would you say was maybe the biggest hurdle you had to overcome in that process?
Angela: So I have a pretty big fear of rejection. I think most of us artists do because we're putting out something very vulnerable, most of the time, for other people to see. So definitely kind of getting over my fear of rejection and my fear of people seeing the work that I no longer deemed worthy. But in the grand scheme of things, people don't really care about that very much. They don't really mind when it’s something so personal to like the artists. They just want to support the work and they want to read the story. So just kind of jumping over that barrier of the fear of rejection and just putting it out there and making it permanent. Once you make it permanent, that’s it! It's kind of like, okay, well, it's not like I don't have to be afraid anymore.
Harry: Yeah, absolutely! After that, you illustrated The Bad Parts with M.A. Lanik. Is this book also self-published?
Angela: Yes so this was a concept that me and M.A. Lanik came up with in 2018-2019. We were hanging out in the basement of my mom's house because I recently had gone through a divorce and we were just talking. We came up with this idea because M.A was really interested in journalism and the most dangerous locations, geographicall,y on Earth. And I'm a memoirist. So we kind of together came up with this idea where the most dangerous parts of the earth are talked about by the personified Earth.
Harry: I understand that you actually drew a large part of the book right here at Bantha Tea House?
Angela: Yeah, actually, at this exact table. A lot of the book was drawn on my iPad right here at Bantha Tea House in Bloomfield. We did a lot of back and forth and figuring out which locations we were going to feature in the book and what the vibe of the drawings were going to be. It's darker than some of the stuff that I normally do. So one of the jokes that we had is that M.A would say “You keep trying to put cartoon skulls and everything, and I need to stop doing that.” So we kind of came to an agreement about how dark the images would be.
Harry: That's a good insight, and I want to show off one of my favorite drawings. It's this page for the East African Rift. This was very magical.
Angela: Yeah, that was one of my favorite ones to draw!
(Image courtesy of artist)
Harry: Is it a pretty noticeable difference between illustrating for a writer versus for yourself?
Angela: Yeah because for myself, I can do whatever I want, right? So I’m almost always going to pick what I'm most comfortable with and what I like the most. But whenever you're working with somebody else, you have to take into consideration their vision and what they do. It's not just about me. It's about their vision and who they want to make the book for. So there's a bunch of different conditions that go into it.
Honestly, collaborating with another person is one of the best things in the world for me. It's harder for sure. Sometimes there's mis-communication, sometimes your feelings get a little bit hurt because you send something that you really like and the other person, well, maybe they like it, but they're like, it's not quite what I was looking for. But as long as both of you are positive and give good feedback and are receptive to each other, it can be one of the best feelings in the world to make something with somebody else.
Harry: That's fantastic. I think the result really shows! So after your years of experience with illustration, what would you say are some of the tools that are integral to your process?
Angela: The number one thing is my iPad Pro and pencil. I do all of my professional work with the app Procreate. I started using that in 2016 and I have not gone back. That is my go to because it’s affordable, not a subscription, and for the most part it's compatible with industry standards. I do have a Canon Pixma Pro printer that I use to print prints, my business cards and things in my home studio. It's always good to look into third party companies or if you're doing larger things, but I found that I would never not have a home printer just because I can print anything, for shows and stuff, on demand. Especially for things like Zine Fair and PIE coming up. And then an editing software. I know some people use Clip Art Studio or Adobe, or whatever you have access to. That’s also very important as well because you'll be resizing a lot of things.
Harry: So where can folks go to discover more of your work?
Angela: Start at Angela Oddling.com and subscribe to my newsletter where I share comics every week, write about my creative process, and the different kinds of events and shows that I'm doing. I'm also @angelaoddling on pretty much every social media platform so if you just type my name, you'll be able to find me anywhere!
